We’re continuing our look at running a selfhosted WordPress website on page 60, but publishing a personal website needn’t be costly or complicated. User-friendly platforms such as WordPress and Wix let you publish online for free – you might not even need to pay for web hosting. They give you everything you need to design and populate your site, maintain it and interact with visitors. Nearly half a billion websites are built on WordPress, while over 200 million people use Wix.
But which should you choose? It’s not a case of one being better than the other. They approach the task from different angles. More apt would be to look at the jobs a personal website publisher needs to undertake, to see how each handles them. The best place to start is with hosting, as the choice you make can determine on its own whether WordPress or Wix is right for you.
Hosting options
You can host your site for free as a subdomain of WordPress.com – or if you have your own domain, you can run it there, without paying a penny to WordPress itself. Many web hosts offer one-click deployment of WordPress, and they can also take care of tracking and installing updates to the WordPress software, along with any themes and extensions you’ve installed.
If your host doesn’t offer an option like this, you can upload and configure yourself. All you need is a server running PHP 7.4 or later, plus either or later, or or later, which fewthen uploading the files to the root of the site (or a folder if appropriate), before editing the wp-config.php file so it contains your database login details. You then have full administrative control of the site via the dashboard – and are responsible for making sure your themes and extensions are updated, and managing other tasks like backup and customising the permalink structure.
